The search for a theoretical
peg on which to hang this paper led me, inevitably, to Homi Bhabha.
Yet when I pulled out Nation and Narration in quest of an apt
quote to use as an epigraph, the best I could come up with was actually
a passage from Benedict Anderson, whom Bhabha himself quotes in his
introduction. Anderson, through Bhabha, states: What I am proposing
is that Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously
held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded
it, out of which  as well as against which  it came into
being. 1Bhabha jumps from
this quotation directly, and without explanation, to writing. I was
surprised. I didnt recall this book as being so narrowly focused.
True, its supposed to be about narration. But surely the conflation
of cultural representation (as he calls it on the next page)
into one particular mode of representation requires some explanation.
Especially if one is purporting to talk about a phenomenon that precedes
self-consciously held ideas. Why not painting? Why not  if we
are going to focus on ideology  television? For that matter, why
not everyday life in all its abundance and variety? If there really
is a large cultural system that underlies, and expresses,
and perhaps even creates Nation, then surely its key characteristic
has to be its pervasiveness. Theres no sense of this in Nation
and Narration. Though the book includes a token piece on the
Englishness of English art, and though Bhabha himself, in his
conclusion, diverges briefly into consideration of a film, the collection
as a whole suggests, albeit silently, that literature can somehow be
taken to stand for culture at large.

Theres nothing unusual
about this, of course. One of the most entrenched peculiarities of Western
education is the notion that one can extrapolate the world from compartmentalized
subject matters. Nor is it surprising that it is literature that should
be given pride of place. Its an axiom of recent theory that language
is a privileged category, our key means not just of communicating, but
of knowing, of being human, of constructing and manipulating social
reality. Language plays a central part in the thought of Barthes,
Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, as it does in the anthropology of Levi-Strauss,
said an early text on structuralism. All of them, it could be
said, are obsessed by it. They are obsessed by the institutional nature
of language, and by its infinite productivity. It is not something we
each bring with us into the world at birth, but an institution into
which we are gradually initiated as the most fundamental element of
all our socialization. 2On
the surface, theres nothing the least bit remarkable in this passage.
Nowadays it would go without saying. But is the sensibleness of this
stance really as self-evident as it has come to seen? Without challenging
either the practical or the psychological importance of language in
maintaining social systems, what Im going to suggest, at least
provisionally, is that when it comes to sense of place it is possible
that seeing precedes saying. If this is the case, then it is also possible
that when we are talking about the underpinnings to collective identity,
it is visual representation, not writing, that provides our privileged
entry. Ill come back to this later. For now, Ill just say
that this essay operates on the assumption that visual culture doesnt
just provide an interesting other perspective on the issue
of how nation-ness is constructed or expressed  it is at least
as important an indicator as narrative.

So  assuming Anderson is right, and leaving aside the problem
of competing media, what is the cultural formation that underlies and
drives our ideas of Canada? Im going to tackle this question indirectly
by looking at some of the diverse phenomena that led me to my own vision
of the country. Ill begin the excursion with something that isnt
obviously cultural at all. Erving Goffman is well known
as a key figure in the development of an important American school of
qualitative sociology known as symbolic interactionism. What isnt
so well known is that Goffman was born and raised a Canadian. The reason
this is important rather than merely interesting is that it makes Goffmans
peculiarities as a scholar look considerably less peculiar. His view
of the world as threatening and irrational, of interpersonal relations
as fraught with danger, and of individuals as the passive victims of
their social and institutional environments 3
these features are strikingly reminiscent of the gloomy-through-catastrophic
strain in Canadian literature that has led critics like Margaret Atwood
to see the Canadian as incurably paranoid: Given a choice of the
negative or positive aspects of any symbol  sea as life-giving
Mother, sea as what your ship goes down in; tree as symbol of growth,
tree as what falls on your head  Canadians show a marked preference
for the negative. 4What
Atwood might not find so readily recognizable, on the other hand, is
that the means recommended by Goffman for dealing with these perils
is also arguably an artifact of his Canadian mindset. Obsessed with
boundary management, fascinated with artifice, and fixated on the ceremonials
of everyday life, Goffmans dramaturgical model for social interaction
5vividly anticipates the fixation
of Canadians  and Im not just talking writers and artists
here  on the motif of mediation in all its guises and dimensions.
Demonstrating the continuity between life and art, in fact, one might
say that the world implicit in Goffmans sociology,
6and the stance he assumes in
the face of it, is the same world and the same stance one might infer
from an examination of Canadian self-representations.

Let me give you an example
of what I mean by this. Cynthia Scotts prizewinning 1990 film,
The Company of Strangers, a markedly unAmerican story about a
busload of elderly women who get stranded for two days in a remote region
of the Laurentians, has been widely recognized as having a quality of
civility that speaks of its national origin. One could imagine
a Hollywood version of [this film,] says Jill McGreal in a review
in Sight and Sound, in which the cast would include several well-known
stars, most of whom would not be old themselves, and in which there
would undoubtedly be a male character [who functioned] as a catalyst
for the action. The women would have to overcome life-threatening situations
and one of them would certainly die. Cynthia Scotts film, however,
takes a different, more contemplative approach to the trials and tribulations
of old age. 7I agree with
McGreals comments about the films difference. What I dont
agree with is her suggestion that it is about one particular
demographic group. Trapped as they are in the middle of a beautiful
but alien wilderness, full of strange noises and impervious to penetration,
these women are literal emblems for that oh-so-Canadian syndrome that
Northrop Frye called the garrison mentality. 8

The implication emerges right
from the beginning. It is telling, for instance, that our initial glimpse
of the group has them struggling to fight their way free not only from
the forest but also from the fog. The first thing they do when the breakdown
occurs is to head for shelter  the old farmhouse which is Scotts
version of the fort in the wilderness. Once ensconced, moreover, they
stick very close. While it is true that there are a few cautious forays
into the borderlands  a typical example of this is a scene where
two of the characters are shown carrying seats into a field where they
proceed to survey the world through the safe mediation of binoculars
 what centers the diegesis are the recurrent images of women almost
literally clinging to their temporary home: peering through windows,
sitting on steps, standing in doorways, leaning against walls or railings,
singly or in groups. The film is also peppered with references to the
less tangible means by which the pioneer creates a bastion against chaos
 songs, dances, stories, games, communal food preparation. It
is notable that as the establishing shots of the ramshackle building
turn from lonely to cozy, it is the voices that make the difference.
It is also notable that the noble savage figure in the film, a Mohawk
woman, gives lessons to her compeers not in wildness but in language
and in primitive technology. But this resistance to American conventions
is consistent throughout. These women survive their ordeal, not as the
fictional American would, by finding and revealing a reservoir of inner
strength and wisdom, but by banding together, by becoming a company
 literally, as do Goffmans subjects, by using the rituals
of everyday life as a mediating device, to create community. 9What we have here, in fact, is a singularly Canadian
recapitulation of how we won the West. If the film went
no further than this it would already be a notable exemplar. Showing
the work of interaction is not the only, or indeed, the most important
way that this film models mediation, however. What is more significant
is not what it depicts, but what it is.

What do I mean by this? Let
me step back a little before getting down to the point. I said that
Company shouldnt be viewed simply as a representation of
old women. The fact that the protagonists are both old and women is,
however, a key element in our response. I have written elsewhere about
the Canadian symbolic ego being feminine, a side-effect of our interiority
and disidentification with power. 10What
Id claim here is that the sense of lurking mortality usually associated
with old age is also typical of the Canadians general sense of
being-in-the-world (see Appendix 1). The
vulnerability of Scotts characters, the thing we identify with
as Canadians, comes from the fact that they are not just on the edge
of nature, but also on the edge of that greater unknown, death. On one
level, indeed, the forest in this film may be seen as actually standing
for death. And not just in a metaphorical sense, either. The truth
is that nature and death have always been intimately intertwined in
the Canadian imagination. At first this was because the most immediate
threat to our survival was out there, in nature.
Later, paradoxically, it was because it wasnt  because,
on the contrary, the most palpable aspect of nature for the postcolonial
Canadian is the aspect we carry around in our own bodies. This is probably
why there are so many cautionary tales in Canadian literature about
people going out into nature and getting killed by it  its
an attempt to keep otherness safely on the outside. Bear stories notwithstanding,
however, what seems clear from the constellation of symbols that has
grown up around these two concepts is that the real reason nature retains
a negative or at least ambiguous emotional charge for us is not 
or not only  because it is the home of wild animals and killer
storms but because of the extent to which it evokes the idea of corporeality,
the intransigence of the flesh, and the inevitability of decay. 11You will see why I said that the age of the women
in Strangers made them more rather than less suitable to represent
Canadians. Scotts cross-referencing of wilderness with death is
the key to the whole film, not only adding an extra coloration to the
emotional overtones of the setting, but also providing a point of entry
into another whole dimension of meaning.

The project, on this level,
begins in exposing its own  and our own  lack. Covert
but unmistakable, the fact that there is a shadow wilderness lurking
behind the real wilderness which cannot be managed
by the simple rituals of human interaction is conveyed not only by the
talk of death, the evidence of fragility, and the emotions, ranging
from innocent hope to barely submerged panic, with which the women respond
to their anticipations, but even more through the filmmakers strategy
of interlarding her text with black and white photographs of the actors
as they appeared at earlier stages of their life. Standing as they do
for the sheer palpability of absence, the hidden and unsharable life
that lurks beneath the surface of chat and chore-doing, these images,
more than anything else in the film, bespeak the double tragedy of human
existence: the fact that the past, even the past self, is literally
estranged; the fact, even more, that we are alone  frozen in our
separate and ineluctable identities  in the face of the future.
It is their knowledge, and ours, of this unspeakable truth that Scotts
characters are dancing around when they regress from their daytime companionability
to their nighttime complaints about the dark, and the animal noises,
and the uncertainty of their fate. Against this confrontation,
companionship, even community, provides little protection. What does?
At the risk of invoking a discredited modernist bogey, the lesson of
Scotts film, as, at least implicitly, of many other Canadian texts,
is that the only recourse we have against the horror of mortality is
art. Like the mediator of myth, the art text, in modeling wholeness,
effects a reconciliation between the self and its most-feared other.
12Unlike the modernist version
of this story, on the other hand, the particular paradigm presented
by Canadian texts has nothing to do with a recuperation or discovery
of will. This is where Goffmans example becomes pertinent. Echoing
the validation of community we find in the storyline, the mimesis in
Strangers is not about inwardness (as it would be in the American
version) but about between-ness.

The key here is the texts
resistance to categorization. Strangers is a made-up, carefully planned
and scripted story about real people who play themselves. It arises
not from an auteurs singular impulse, but from the collaboration
between the filmmakers vision and her actors life experiences.
13Lest the audience be tempted
at any point to forget this, moreover, the film is constructed in such
a way as to highlight rather than disguise its ambiguous status. The
camerawork and the self-consciousness of the editing draw attention
to its made-ness and artistry. The photographs and the self-consciousness
of the women draw attention to the given-ness of the raw
material from which it is constructed. The effect of this ambivalence
is not merely to resist the limitations of one perspective, one particular
kind of truth value, but to force the audience to identify with a position
which is neither subjective nor objective but somewhere between the
two. One might, in fact, say that what Scott has created here is a tangible
facsimile of the classical Greek speech category known as the middle
voice.

For reasons extending far
beyond the film, the comparison is a provocative one. In classical Greece,
says Pierre Vernant, we see two cases, one in which the action
is ascribed to the agent like an attribute to a subject, and another
in which the action envelopes the agent and the agent remains immersed
in the action  that is the case of the middle voice. 14Why is this significant? Vernant doesnt stop
here. In thought as expressed in Greek or ancient Indo-European,
he continues, there is no idea of the agent being the source
of his action. Or, if I may translate that, as a historian of Greek
civilization, there is no category of will in Greece. But what
we see in the Western world, through language, the evolution of law,
the creation of a vocabulary of the will is precisely the idea of the
human subject as agent, the source of actions, creating them, assuming
them, carrying responsibility for them. In the Western world,
maybe, but not in Canada. In Canada  as Goffman suggests, and
as our art and literature insist on reminding us  we share with
the Greeks a vision of the individual as, at least potentially, a pawn
and sometimes casualty of a possibly inimical, at least impervious Fate.

The connections Vernant draws
here may explain at least in part why Scotts film is so satisfying
despite its sounding of the themes of death and decay. The middle voice
spoke not only for but also to the Greek sense of self.
The same could be said about Strangers. By expressing and thus
in a sense legitimizing will-lessness, its mode of address legitimizes
the Canadian sense of impotence. And not just in a negative sense, either.
The text provides its own legitimization as well, not least because
of the poignancy with which it addresses an anxiety so deeply buried
in the national psyche as to be inaccessible to our normal modes of
discourse. Again, a comparison is instructive. Vernant speaks elsewhere
in the same essay of Greek tragedy as expressing and mediating an un-admitted
and inadmissible tension between a heroic past and a circumscribed sense
of the present. Canadians, too  bombarded with, but alienated
from, the American myth of self-reliance  are caught between fear
of/fascination with the heroic other and shame for/comfort in the banality
of self. Perhaps it is only natural, then, that we would seek our relief
in the same way that the Greeks did: by exorcising both shame and
fascination through a ritual validation of middle-ness.

One might take note here
of the fact that the great Greek tragedies exhibit very much the same
homology between diegesis and mimesis as Scotts film. If, as stories,
they affirm the value of the social over the personal, as events 
and the meaning on this level is summarized in the capacity of the mask
to function simultaneously to transform and to protect its wearer 15 they literally reproduce the reconciliation
of human and inhuman. This same reconciliation, I would claim, is the
primary project  and the primary strategy  not just
of The Company of Strangers, but of the mega-text of which it
forms a part. Does that sound improbable? While space clearly doesnt
permit a detailed examination of the whole corpus, a few selected examples
will, I hope, provide a sense both of the coherence of the Canadian
cultural continuum and of the diverse ways that different works and
media manage to add up to the same thing. Although, given the venue,
I have focused on visual materials, I could just as easily have chosen
verbal ones. (This is perhaps the real answer to the words versus images
debate.) Three features in particular recur across the board: the invocation
of the dangers of being on the edge; the validation of community as
a defense against these dangers; and the modeling of means for effecting
and/or buffering the risky but critical task of going between.
The first is implicit in almost everything Canadians make; the second
is so common as to be one of the few consensually recognized features
of Canadian high and popular culture; the third, somewhat less frequent,
represents the moment when the mythic and the aesthetic dimensions of
the oeuvre come together to produce catharsis.

PaintingI said earlier that
the thing that struck many critics about The Company of Strangers
was its un-Americanness. The same might be said of Canadian painting
as a whole. Take what we did with modernism, for instance. Or more critically,
take what we didnt do. When someone says modern art,
the one idiom that springs most readily to mind is abstract expressionism,
with its heroic pretensions and air of transgressiveness. The New York
oeuvre in particular exemplified both of these tendencies  arrogant,
iconoclastic, aggressive, many of the pieces so full of energy that
they seem ready at any moment to break right out of the frame. Theres
no trace of this in Canadian painting of the same period. If one had
to pick a single word to describe this body of work, in fact, it would
probably be introverted. In part, this is a matter of emotional
register. Alternatively, though, it relates to hard, demonstrable technical
preferences. One noteworthy datum is the fact that Canadian paintings
are almost always centered, both visually and psychologically.
In many pieces, this orientation is further accentuated by an inside/outside
organization of pictorial space. The whole corpus, in fact, is overflowing
with enclosure images. It is also overflowing with signs of anxiety
about the integrity and the meaning of these enclosures. Are they cages
or caves? How firm are those walls? And whats on the inside? Cutting
as it does across both stylistic and regional lines, the boxed
experience  the boxing of experience  is obviously in some
way paradigmatic or revelatory for the Canadian. As a result of this
propensity, where American art both invites and suggests a kind of mental
and emotional breaking out, Canadian painting bespeaks a
strong sense of the selfs limits; of its isolation and impotence
in the face of otherness. Where does it come from, this reticence and
trepidation? Measured against an American standard, the Canadian response
seems odd, inappropriate. Measured against the countrys own history,
however, it seems almost predictable.

Lets turn the clock
back a bit, to the nineteenth century. The most popular genre on both
sides of the border during this period was landscape painting. But theres
a difference. The nature we find in the American version is idealized
certainly, but just as certainly accessible. The nature we infer from
our own version, in contrast, even when not explicitly inimical, is
alien, impenetrable, overwhelming to the point of claustrophobia. This
is a world in which the observer is always looking uphill. Where rivers
carry us out of rather than into the distance. Where the eye rebounds
constantly to its starting place. Its a world, in other words,
which categorically denies us entry. Contrasting starkly with the American
penchant for panorama, the kinds of natural features we are most likely
to find in Canadian paintings are notable mainly for their obtrusiveness.
Woods are like walls. Waterfalls are like bowls. Mountains stretch like
palisades across the picture plane or squat inimically in the middle
of the canvas. Nowhere is there the sense of opening up, of laying claim
to the horizon  that is the hallmark of contemporaneous American
work. Far from asserting their ascendency, the creators of these
landscapes would clearly prefer to dissociate themselves from the at-large
altogether.

Enclosure, then, is just
as much a keynote of premodern as it is of recent Canadian art. More
important, the attitudes evinced by the artists towards their
existential condition are also similar in both periods. And Im
not simply talking about negativity here. Claustrophobia notwithstanding,
the characterizing feature of the Canadian world-view is in fact neither
affirmation nor abhorrence, but a radical, deep-seated ambivalence.
There is, in other words, an up- as well as a down-
side to introversion. I said above that Canadian painting bespeaks a
strong sense of isolation and impotence. What I might perhaps have added
was that  like Scotts film  it also offers a number
of therapeutic models for dealing with or responding to these uncomfortable
feelings. Many of the aforementioned iconic boxes exude a feeling not
of entrapment but of safety. And so it is with at least a few among
those claustrophobic nineteenth-century landscape paintings. Thickets
are transformed into nests. Tombs become wombs. The sheer visual dominance
of the other is recoded as protective. In short, enclosure, no longer
constricting, becomes validated as beneficent.

The centripetal vision is not necessarily a negative vision, then. Nor
does the process of naturalization stop at such simple ploys as role
reversal. Indeed, if we consider both periods in juxtaposition, it becomes
apparent that in the nineteenth century, as in the twentieth, the Canadians
perspectival biases serve not merely as an expression of his
or her felt relations with otherness, but as a means of neutralizing
the dangers implicit in those relations. How does this work? Consider
the aforementioned feature of obtrusiveness, for instance. When David
Thompson, in 1810, painted a solid screen of mountains across his canvas,
it tells us that he is repelled by this topography. When Tom
Thomson does the same thing a hundred years later, however, he is able
to translate that knee-jerk recoil into a highly successful aesthetic
strategy. In rationalizing the superficiality, which earlier worked
to undermine the illusion, Thomson gives us the means not merely of
delineating but also of managing the dangerous interface between
self and other.

Once we make this leap, it
is possible to also see something a little different in the recent penchant
for enclosure images. Many of these figures are simply extensions of
or variants on the aforementioned womb symbol. Some still carry the
emotional stigmata of the even earlier claustrophobia. Most interesting
of the ilk, however, are cases  like William Ronalds Ontario
Place or Gordon Rayners Magnetawan or Michael Snows
Lac Clair  where the enclosure is no longer a box for the
self, benign or malignant, but an imposure on an unruly reality.
Why interesting? In the same way that the foreshortened focus of the
colonial landscape painter can be read as signifying both an anxiety
and a mode of managing it, once the iconic box begins to change from
container to frame it no longer passively mirrors the
plight of the isolated ego but provides the auditor with a means of
controlling the very element from which he or she has hitherto been
most concerned to dissociate. At this point the line around begins actually
to mediate the space between. 16

FilmIt is interesting but
not surprising that one of Canadas best known filmmakers, David
Cronenberg, devoted his first eight feature films to exploring what
happens when the integrity of self is not maintained. 17Too easily dismissed as schlock horror, Cronenbergs
studies in psychic and corporeal breakdown demonstrate, in a sense,
what would happen if Scotts women  or any of us  were
to venture, without some kind of ritual protection, beyond their boundaries,
into the forest. This kind of explicitness is rare. More characteristically,
in Canadian film, the dangers are presented obliquely, and in the context
of compensating solutions. The underlying idea, however  that
edges are scary, that transgression is even scarier  is a consistent
motif in both Anglophone and Francophone variants. As in Company,
moreover, it lays the ground for  triggers or focuses or mobilizes
 a number of other distinctive tendencies. For present purposes,
three in particular stand out.

The first has to do with
the treatment of gender. While the problem does not arise in Company,
with its female-only complement of actors, the national ambivalence
about power and power-wielders (see Appendix
1) has made it difficult for filmmakers to fit their male characters
into conventional moulds. As with the paintings discussed in the last
section, there is an up- as well as a down-side to this predicament.
At worst, it accounts for an overabundance of the kind of loser
types that Robert Fothergill talks about in his classic 1973 essay,
Coward, Bully or Clown: The Dream Life of a Younger Brother.
18At best it has provided the
occasion for some memorable explorations of the links between compromised
masculinity and a history of colonization. In earlier versions of this
genre  like Don Shebibs Goin Down the Road
(1970)  the connections tend to be left implicit. In later cases,
arguably because of the debate over Fothergills thesis, the political
subtext is often brought right to the center of the stage. In Mort Ransens
Margarets Museum, a 1995 film set in a 1940s mining community
in Cape Breton, for example, the titular exhibit of dismembered male
bodies is clearly intended as a paradigm for the collective unmanning
already accomplished by the insatiable greed of foreign and central
Canadian capital. Such blatancy is relatively rare, however. Between
the extremes of both denigration and defensiveness is a large slate
of films which avoid the issue by focusing on what one might call the
properly unmasculine  women, children, homosexuals,
transvestites, and the physically or mentally handicapped. Confirming
the original dissociative impulse, the child-characters in particular
are often paired with dysfunctional or abusive father figures. Some
notable examples of this would be Claude Jutras Mon Oncle Antoine
(1971), Anne Wheelers Loyalties (1985), and  of particular
interest insofar as it also includes nods to the themes of physical
debility and homosexuality  Thom Fitzgeralds The Hanging
Garden (1997).

The second feature could
be seen, in a sense, as a corollary to the first. If heroic
characters present problems, judging by the results, Canadian filmmakers
are even more ambivalent about heroic solutions. On the other hand,
because American-style commercial film is what the public  or
at least the distributers  appear to want, it is difficult for
them to break openly with the Hollywood tradition. One result of this
is simply bad films  cynical films, or out-of-control films, or
films where the creators are quoting conventions they cant fully
get their hearts around. In a surprising number of cases, though, the
filmmakers have devised ways to eat their cake without showing their
teeth. One popular approach involves symbolically defusing the heroic
myth by invoking and deconstructing American genre conventions. Sometimes
this is accomplished simply by naturalizing the hero. In Sandy Wilsons
My American Cousin (1986), for instance, the young rebel, with his
James Dean good looks and his aura of recklessness, is revealed as simply
an ordinary, rather silly, and notably immature teenage runaway. 19Sometimes it involves exposing the dark or seamy
undersides to the convention. Typical of this latter ilk is David Wellingtons
I Love a Man in Uniform (1993), where a play-acting wannabe cop
is caught up in an escalating but non-cathartic cycle of violence. 20

Yet most often this reluctance
towards a heroic solution entails some kind of containment strategy.
As one might expect, the commonest version of this involves an appeal
to community. The variations on this theme are almost as numerous as
the films that have used it. For a positive example, there is Don McKellars
anti-apocalyptic disaster tale, Last Night (1998), where the
inhabitants of a Canadian city contemplate the approaching cataclysm
with reason and resignation and a surprising amount of good humor. For
a negative, one might choose Atom Egoyans The Sweet Hereafter
(1997), where a community is torn apart in the wake of disastrous school
bus accident when an out-of-town lawyer goads them into a divisive lawsuit.
For ambiguity, on the other hand, one couldnt do better than the
group-made sci-fi movie, Cube (1997), where, in the words of
the back-cover blurb from the Alliance video release, six ordinary
strangers awaken to find themselves in a seemingly endless maze of interlocking
cubical chambers armed with deadly booby traps. Given that these
traps are triggered by traversing from one chamber into the next, one
could hardly imagine a more graphic representation of edge-anxiety.
The blurb continues: As they work together to extricate themselves
from their claustrophobic cell, one thing becomes painfully clear 
unless they learn to cooperate to solve the secrets of this deadly trap,
none of them has very long to live. I wont reveal the ending
of this film, except to say that it is both surprising and predictable.
But what could be more Canadian than the premise!

The third element I want
to talk about takes us out of the realm of story to more technical usages.
Just as Scott is not the only filmmaker who promotes a collective viewpoint
in her plot, she is also not the only filmmaker who makes the text itself
into a paradigm of mediation. It is significant in this respect that
the kind of feature film that I have been talking about in the last
few paragraphs is a relatively late development in Canada. For most
of its history, the Canadian film industry has been driven largely by
government-sponsored non-commercial production. 21What ultimately raised the oeuvre above the blandness
of public service and schoolroom movies  and laid the ground for
a powerful new idiom  was the post-war search for a middle ground
between the subjectivity of conventional Anglo-American documentary,
with its imperial voice-over, and the object-orientation of direct
cinema with its obeisance to the thing seen.

Tellingly, the thing that
distinguishes Canadian direct cinema from other versions of cinema vérité
is the way it plays on or against that ground. 22Claude Jutra, back in the sixties, annoyed critics
for blurring the line between fact and fiction. Pierre Perrault, similarly,
destabilized expectations by creating fictions claiming the authority
of documentary. Nor was the impulse to obfuscate limited to the French
side of the language line. Allan King, to give only one particularly
well-known example, achieved similar destablization by offsetting a
notably passive style of camerawork with an interventionist style of
editing. From here it was only a short step to Scott. As the not-quite-documentary
of the late fifties through mid-seventies turned into the alternative
drama of the eighties, the middle voice became progressively more confident
and more distinctive. It also discovered new strategies not anticipated
in the cinema vérité tradition. Films like Patricia Rozemas
Ive Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) and Denys Arcands
Jesus of Montreal (1989), for instance, not only continued the
trend to genre blurring but exacerbated the uncertainty by using ambiguous
inner fictions 23 ambiguous
in the sense that they bear undecidable relationships to truth on the
one hand and reality on the other  to draw attention to the whole
problem of how art means. The commercial corpus is not,
of course, generally as arty as these last two examples.
It is striking, however, that even in productions as mainstream as The
Sweet Hereafter  which won the 1997 Cannes Grand Prix and
was nominated for two academy awards  there is a tendency for
the Canadian film text to parade its surface, foiling our attempts at
penetration and throwing us back on ourselves as surely as those nineteenth-century
landscape paintings.

Television (see
Appendix 2)
The most popular form of media included my survey, surprisingly enough,
makes just as much use of formal features for therapeutic purposes as
high art and film. Whether it is because of the way it invokes Americanness
or because we are threatened by its aura of commercialism, Canadian
television production is almost an extended inquest on the subject,
and the dangers, of between-ness. Many of the strategies we have already
noted with respect to other media turn up again here. Theres the
community emphasis of family fare like Road to Avonlea or Neon
Rider. Theres the anti-conventionality of Canadian versions
of American-style action shows like Seeing Things,
Adderly, Counterstrike, Due South, or Forever
Knight, with their qualms about power and their domestication/disavowal/punishment
of their heroes. Theres the obsession with liminality  check
out how many of the emotional moments in Canadian television dramas
take place at thresholds. Theres even the use of frames, in genre
shows like ENG and Night Heat, to provide the viewer with
a symbolic buffer against the irrationality not only of the American-style
aggressor, but also of the public world in general.

Where television goes further
than most of the other categories, however, is in the way its most basic
technical features echo the message of its stories. The cinematography
itself is un-American. Visually, Canadian television is almost always
characterized by a greater depth of field and a more evenly distributed
focus. We see more of the background, and it is more fully realized.
Correspondingly, we see less of the personalities. Characters are shot
at longer range, and with a less intimate, less confrontational lens.
We get far fewer of the extreme close-ups that are almost a trademark
of American commercial television  and when we do, they are more
often than not designed to increase our discomfort than cement our identification
with the protagonist.

Adding to the distancing
effect of the less intense camerawork, Canadian productions tend to
provide a running reference to context through the use of nested
spaces; the emphasis on non-diegetic activity on the peripheries of
the action; and the use of off-screen noise to suggest outside.
Enclosure motifs are omnipresent. Violence is buffered, distanced, or
denaturalized by implicit and explicit strategies of containment. Similar
strategies are used to diffuse and qualify emotion. The screen is is
a strongly felt presence in Canadian television. Dampening the impulse
to identify, viewpoint is stabilized by the camera, not by the characters.
The community is also omnipresent, whether or not it is an explicit
player in the action. Direct cinema techniques of extended takes and
minimalist editing are employed to underline the extent to which individuals
and events are connected by an ongoing network of relations. Appropriately
for present purposes, the most striking example of this usage is the
handling of court scenes, where, in marked contrast to the American
preference for close-ups and rapid fire shot/reverse shot sequences
to underscore the combative relationship between participants (for Americans,
the courtroom confrontation is the modern version of the gun fight on
Main Street), Canadian directors use a deeper, more inclusive focus,
along with more panning and tracking shots, to situate the action in
a clearly social context, with the judge as paternalistic referee. 24

One thing that should perhaps
be added here is that, counter to the common belief that any distinctiveness
Canadian pop culture ever possessed has disappeared as a side-effect
of globalization, 25there is
no sign that these practices have been falling out of use in recent
years. If anything, the covert markers of Canadian-ness tend to appear
more prominently in those areas of collective endeavor 
like television  that have been brought into closer symbolic
or economic proximity to the American megalith. If I were going to pick
an exemplary television text, in the same sense that Company is
exemplary for film, in fact, it would be DaVincis Inquest,
a three-year-old CBC drama series about a crime-fighting Vancouver coroner
named Nicholas DaVinci. Sound familiar? The capsule description is misleading.
Notwithstanding the overlap in subject matter, this is no Crossing
Jordan or CSI. (Even leaving aside the heroics, in the Canadian
version of this genre, the emphasis is on procedure and teamwork, not
science and ingenuity.) Nor does it owe much to the original American
crusading coroner, Quincy, with his irascibility and constant
run-ins with authority. DaVinci is a distinctly Canadian brand of "hero"
-- flawed, ordinary, unaggressive; committed to truth and justice, but
rather plodding in his pursuit of it -- just as the vehicle in which
he appears has a distinctly Canadian look and logic.

We find a particularly striking
example of this in an episode on police violence that aired in the fall
of 2000. Despite the hackneyed nature of the plot premise, this episode
could almost stand as a recipe for Canadian difference. Three features
in particular stand out. First, because the victim/aggressor is a mentally
disturbed man who has cut himself off from his normal sources of support,
there is a strong indication that the cause of the problem was social
isolation leading to a failure of boundary maintenance. The correlation
made between danger and thresholds, and the use of images of shattering
glass to mark the moment of maximum violence, add to this effect by
underlining the literally transgressive nature of his behavior. Second,
because the story is told from the perspective, and within the context,
of an inquest, what it gives us is a practical demonstration of the
community in action. It is the community  not the hero, not the
authorities, not even the viewer, who never sees the events directly
 that winkles out the true story from among the conflicting
accounts; it is the community that assigns or distributes responsibility
(in this case, typically, it is the system, not the individual,
which is found to blame); and it is the community that decides what
should be done about it. Last, and perhaps most striking, the episode
demonstrates some of the commonest strategies used by Canadian creators
to distance us from the action. The story is safely in the past, and
is seen only through other peoples eyes. The process of retelling
is mediated through the regulated formality of the hearing procedure.
The fact that there is no single authoritative version of the story
(as the visual text reminds us with its insistence on a shifting viewpoint)
forces us to maintain a skeptical and detached attitude throughout.
Finally, the visual and aural distortions used during the flashbacks
de-naturalize the action even further. All of these aspects function
to rebuild the boundaries that the aggressor threatens to break down.
Like the photographs in Scotts film, it also reminds us of the
elusiveness of truth, the over-againstness of transpersonal reality,
and the ultimate inaccessibility of the other.

****************

One thing that becomes clear
when we see these examples arranged in sequence like this, from earlier
to later, simple to more complex  that we cant get from
examining even the most well-chosen single text  is the sheer
consistency of the ways in which Canadian artists have most commonly
imagined being-in-the-world. Another  and this goes back to what
I said in my introduction  is the apparent privileging of the
pictorial in these imaginings. Even in the cinematic media, it is the
visual rather than the narrative features that carry the main burden
of meaning. This is not to say that one could not find similar patterns
in written materials. My first book, The Wacousta Syndrome(see
note 8) was an extended peroration on exactly the same themes in
Canadian literature. Nor is it only literary writers who are fixated
on between-ness. I already mentioned Goffman. However anomalous he may
be in the annals of American sociology, he is far from an anomaly among
Canadian intellectuals. If they arent writing about difference
(borders, boundaries, edges, and margins are endemic among recent Canadian
book titles 26), they are contemplating
ways to connect. The classic topic for Canadian historians has been
the role played by communication and transportation networks in the
development of civilization in general and Canadian society in particular.
27

Even our public life shows
something of an obsession with middle-ness. I was struck a few years
ago when I came across a book by political scientist Carolyn Tuohy entitled,
provocatively, Policy and Politics in Canada: Institutionalized Ambivalence.
What Tuohy meant by this last term was a propensity among Canadians
 which she traces back to seminal tensions between (theres
that word again!) French and English, Canada and the U.S., Ottawa and
the regions  for political solutions that will accommodate both
or all possibilities raised by a situation rather than forcing a choice
between them. The aversion to either/or choices, she says, finds expression
in everything from the division of powers to the development of economic
policy. First, the system legitimizes competing principles 
she argues, [s]econd, it allows these principles to coexist in
a context of constitutional and institutionalized ambiguity. 28Supporting Tuohys analysis  only one
among numerous examples that could be adduced  is the Canadian
Supreme Courts 1998 decision in the Reference on Quebec Separation,
which not only declines to find for or against either party, but also
makes a legal duty out of negotiation. 29Real-world
consequences notwithstanding, this sounds remarkably like yet another
version of Vernants middle voice.

So, yes  the mediation
theme is endemic throughout the whole of Canadian life, not just in
its visual culture. What this multiplication of examples may obscure,
on the other hand, is the extent to which it is the visual culture that
establishes the base terms of reference on which the whole edifice is
erected. From colonial times to the present, as if we suffered from
some giant repetition compulsion, the key project of Canadian culture
has been to reiterate over and over, in ever more elaborate versions,
the image of the fort in the wilderness. Why? Actually, two questions
pose themselves here. First, why an image rather than, say, a story?
(Usually when we think of origins, we think of myths or legends.) Second,
why this particular image? The first question is easy. There
is ample evidence on record that entry into the continent was experienced
by new Canadians in preeminently spatial terms. Northrop Frye, tracing
that garrison trope I mentioned earlier in the paper, talks about the
newcomers sense of being swallowed up by the Gulf
of Saint Lawrence  and certainly this is what emerges from the
letters and diaries that survive from the period. 30He also talks about the way this type
of experience was repeated and reinforced by the encounter with an alien
and apparently limitless wilderness:

In the United States one
could choose to move out to the frontier or to retreat from it back
to the seaboard... In the Canadas, [however] ... the frontier was
all around one, a part and a condition of ones whole imaginative
being. The frontier was what separated the Canadian, physically or
mentally, from Great Britain, from the United States, and even more
important, from other Canadian communities. Such a frontier was the
immediate datum of [the colonists] imagination, the thing that
had to be dealt with first. 31

Note the prominence given
to geography in this formulation. Here, of course, is where the tendency
to pictorialize comes in. When ones most significant other is
the landscape, the most natural way to represent it is with a map. (Spatial
concepts translate far more readily into graphic forms than verbal ones.)
And here as well is the answer to our second question. When the other
is as scary as this particular landscape  Frye talks about one
of the most noticeable features of early Canadian poetry being a
tone of deep terror in regard to nature 32 there is an obvious compulsion to construct
real and symbolic buffers against it.

This brings me back to my
claim about visual representations possibly providing a better window
on the collective consciousness than language. Certainly a case can
be made that the Canadian imagination starts with  and can most
easily be traced through  figurations of place. A case can also
be made that Canada is not alone in this propensity. I talked earlier
about Canadian landscape paintings being claustrophobic. I also talked
about the American difference. Where nineteenth-century Canadian artists
worked to minimize recession and the sense of penetration, Americans
of the same period gave us no more nor less than a visual version of
the physical process by which their forebears conquered the real landscape.
Think of those operatic Hudson River School paintings with their backlit
skies, their heroic personae, their long, sinuous river valleys opening
up the green distance like a compliant woman. If the Canadian viewpoint
is feminine, the American one, with its emulation of the claiming gaze,
is clearly masculine. Why the divergence in what are commonly taken
to be very similar societies? Without getting into details, I will just
say that it has a little to do with the relative harsher Canadian climate
and geography, a little more with the psychological discrepancies between
mission-driven seventeenth-century puritans and prosperity-driven nineteenth-century
immigrants, and a lot to do with the conceptual difference between
a northern and a western frontier, with one representing the limits
of knowledge and the other the limits of endurance. 33In both cases, however, what is important to note
is that the contrasting modes of self-imaging we find in the two countries
correspond precisely to the mental mapping of that first encounter with
the wilderness.

Its not just Canadians,
then, who exhibit a penchant for visualization. Its not even just
North Americans. Although I dont want to confuse matters by dragging
in a whole other example, I will just say that a similar analysis of
Australia produces comparable  though strikingly different 
findings. 34This doesnt,
to be sure, rule out the possibility that the effect is specific to
particular types of societies. It may be significant that all three
of my own examples have involved cases where a semi-civilized people
has been transplanted into an untamed wilderness. I talked earlier about
the shock  or exhilaration, in the American case  of confronting
an absolutely alien landscape. In older cultures, however, where the
environment is, if not domesticated, at least familiar, one might assume
that geography would be a less immediate datum (to use Fryes phrase).
If this is true, then the claims I have made about the primacy of visual
expression would apply only under certain special circumstances.

Is it true? I confess
I dont know the answer to this. Yet I can think of some very good
reasons why it might not be. One of the theorists who initially
drove my own thinking in this direction was Claude Lévi-Strauss.
I was particularly struck by his notion that culture was imprinted with
the cognitive structures of the making mind  a notion that seems
to me no more than common sense. The problem is what Lévi-Strauss
did with the idea. This obviously isnt the place to get into an
explication of either structuralism or its critics, so I will settle
for just a couple of comments. The charge most often levelled against
Lévi-Strauss concerns his insistence on reducing everything to
universal structures. For myself, I am more troubled by his earlier
mentioned privileging of language.

Despite the ostensible generality
of Lévi-Strausss theory, it is notable that most of the
actual instantiations he has dealt with have been either verbal or logical
constructs  myths, kinship, totemic systems. In the few cases
where he looks at more material aspects of culture, they are treated
as objectifications of concepts that have already been given logico-verbal
form. In his analysis of the Bororo village in Structural Anthropology,
for instance, the layout is interpreted as a means of symbolically reconciling
logical discrepancies in the kinship system.35Why
is this a problem? Given what is known about the way human cognition
actually develops, it seems equally or even more likely that the kinship
system is an elaboration of a more fundamental sense of being-in-the-world.
While it is probably true, as Lévi-Strauss insists, that our
most natural mode of organizing experience is in terms of binaries,
common sense suggests that the fundamental binary is not nature:culture
but self:other. I mean, think about it. The one thing that radically
divergent accounts of childhood development have in common is the idea
that awareness begins at the moment when the infant realizes that there
is a difference between self and not-self, a difference
which is inevitably going to be experienced in spatial terms 
here versus there. Nature:culture doesnt come into
it until one starts making further distinctions within there.
This means that the privileging of maps over stories may not be a specific
function of post-frontier cultures (the obsession with landscape in
these cases may be attributed to a historical accident, the fact that
the exigencies of colonization made nature the most critical aspect
of otherness for a hitherto acculturated people), but a function of
all human experience. In this scenario, the privileging of language
in older, particularly Western societies would relate, not to some sort
of existential primacy, but to the long-time accretion of secondary
elaborations. Scrape away these elaborations, and what you are left
with are the pictures  simple, graphic, unmediated (think of kindergarten
self-portraits) representations of self-in-place which express what
is surely the most basic human thought: here I am.

None of this proves anything,
of course. I am doing exactly what Lévi-Strausss critics
accused him of doing  playing mind games. I offer the foregoing
speculations merely as speculations. It seems at least provocative to
note, on the other hand, that the privileging of spatial sense would
provide a better explanation for the pervasiveness of cultural/cognitive
structuring than pinning it all on later-learned language. Mind structures
environment which structures mind. It also seems provocative to note
that, at least in the postcolonial cases, there is actually some hard
evidence for such a connection. Most striking in this respect is the
fact, as I have detailed elsewhere, that Canadian and American settlement
patterns are not only as distinct as, but significantly capable of being
inferred from, general cultural tendencies of the two countries. In
a book called The Myth of the North American City, for instance,
Michael Goldberg and John Mercer established beyond cavil that Canadian
and American cities, long assumed to be rough copies, in fact differ
radically in their management, funding, spatial dispositions, architecture,
psycho-symbology, relations to State and Capital, mappings of class,
and quality of life. In marked contrast to the typically decentered
American pattern, they say, a picture emerges of Canadian urban areas
as being more compact in form with a greater reliance upon public
modes of travel; ... as having a less racially diverse and less racially
segregated population ...; and as having lower status differences between
the inner and the outer cities with the former  this is
a key point here  with the former retaining their traditional
family-oriented households. 36In
other words, while the American city-center has become a wasteland where
no-one lives who could afford to do otherwise, Canadians apparently
like living downtown. What does this have to do with my disquisition
on the modeling of mediation? What we have here is not only a structural
homologue to the paintings I talked about earlier, but a psychological
parallel to Canadian culture in general. Like the fort in the wilderness,
or the house in the film, or the mediated heroes of our homegrown television
fables, the centripetal bias of the Canadian city bespeaks trepidation
about what lies outside.

Does this seem farfetched?
Probably. Especially when there are such exhaustive analyses available
explaining this or that feature in terms of this or that pragmatic factor.
The problem, of course, is that the entity city seems (on
common sense criteria) far too complex to be a simple outering 
in Marshall McLuhans usage 37
of a patterned response. One can accept such a supposition of art. One
can even accept it of architecture. The fact, for instance, that Toronto
City Hall -- with its demi-circular wings, its protective/symbolic bracketing
of explicitly acculturated space -- seems remarkably similar in both
structure and mood to the paintings and sculptures produced by so many
Toronto artists can be attributed to the circumstance that it shares
with these artworks an iconic as well as a pragmatic function. Once
we get beyond simple, singular structures, though, the parallel no longer
seems so persuasive. That Canadians are politer and less violent than
Americans, that our cities are physically more compact and administratively
more integrated, that our perhaps sole significant contribution to architectural
history is the enclosed mega-mall  such phenomena seem too existentially
disparate, not to mention too pragmatically motivated, to be comprehended
under a single class of causes. The mere fact that it runs counter to
popular wisdom  which is, after all, an artifact of common prejudices
 cannot, on the other hand, to taken to prove that
there isnt a hidden coherence beneath the secondary elaboration.

Its interesting in
this regard to consider settlement patterns in parts of the continent
where the elaboration is minimal. Take the north, for instance. More
specifically, take the two different norths we find in Alaska
and the Northwest Territories. Because they are different. Even on a
map scale its evident that the American north is lived in
to a degree that the Canadian one isnt. Check any atlas. Look
at the blank spaces on the Canadian side of the border. Look at the
difference in the density of dots. And even this is misleading. Nearly
all the outlying communities in the Territories are settled by native
peoples. Apart from well-equipped and carefully regulated seasonal expeditions
by tourists and scientists and prospectors, the whites tend to congregate
in a very few, relatively sizable centres. In Alaska just the opposite
is the case. Between and beyond the official dots on the
map, the landscape of Alaska is dotted with people  squatters
and trappers and hermits and gold-panners and naturalists and cottage
entrepreneurs, many from the lower forty-eight, lured to the north by
romantic notions about living rough.

Clearly there are different
ideologies at work here  different levels of self-confidence,
different attitudes about the appropriability of the land. Equally clearly
these ideologies have affected the settlement process in each region,
right down to the shape of the places we make. Despite the
geopolitical contiguity, despite economic similarities, despite the
shared myth of frontier, even casual inspection reveals that these are
markedly different on different sides of the border. And not just cosmetically.
The typical Canadian northern town  and this holds for large places
like Yellowknife as for small ones like Pond Inlet  is a well-serviced,
highly rationalized, pre-fab imitation of a southern community, with
houses tightly huddled and outer boundaries clearly marked. 38Its American counterpart, in contrast, will in all
probability be something like Fairbanks: a sprawling, unbounded, fortuitous
agglomeration of mismatched and often makeshift building types, where
people precede services, where space and privacy are more important
factors in residential site-selection than security, and where the outer
edges seem to be trying to migrate into the trees. 39

But let me not get too far off topic here. The key point to be made
about this contrast is the fact that it recapitulates in direct and
simple terms the same patterned responses so graphically expressed in
the image of the fort. Centripetal versus centrifugal. Closed versus
open. 40At least in the early
stages, then, settlement patterns in North America would appear to have
been controlled neither by circumstances nor by socio-economic factors
but by some mediate kind of structuring related to psychological-cum-aesthetic
predispositions. This brings us full circle to Andersons cultural
system. From paintings to public spaces, the whole spectrum
of Canadian culture tells us that where Americans see boundaries and
frontiers as limitations that can only be transcended or denied, Canadians
see them as dangerous interfaces to be marked and negotiated. And the
pattern holds regardless of arena. Paintings exhibit the same
spatial habits as cities. Or maybe cities exhibit the same spatial habits
as paintings. It doesnt matter  the point is that the image
at the heart of the Canadian cultural formation is a map. Here we
are in the wilderness. Here we are in the world. Here is our place.
Margaret Atwood, possibly Canadas best known writer, begins the
first poem in her borrowed memoir of frontier living, The Journals
of Susanna Moodie, with the line I take this picture of myself.
41This pretty much says it all.
Whatever it is elsewhere, for Canadians, at least, it is the snapshot
of home, not the stories we tell around the campfire, that most saliently
represents Nation.

GAILE MCGREGOR is an Adjunct
Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Faculty of Information
and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, and Director
of Social Research for Terraconnaissance Inc., a London Ontario consulting
company specializing in political communication, trend analysis, and
interdisciplinary social and legal research. Holding graduate degrees
in English and Sociology in addition to an LL.B., McGregor has written
and taught extensively on Canadian and American social, cultural, and
political history. Although her publications have contributed to a number
of diverse fields, she is best known for a 1986 book entitled The
Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Langscape [sic] (University
of Toronto Press), the first volume in a three-volume series of semio-ethnographic
studies of post-frontier societies, which played a key role in shaping
contemporary understandings of Canadian identity-formation. See www3.sympatico.ca/terracon/gaile_mcgregor/index.
htmfor more information.

John Sturrock,
Structuralism and Since (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979),
12.

Goffmans
sociology, says Peter Manning, center[s] upon delineating in detail
the extent to which ... what is portended by normal appearances
... holds a very real potential for terror ... As interaction among
strangers relies heavily on trust, a person who intends to harm may
not outwardly appear to differ from others and be read as emitting normal
communications. To the degree one trusts strangers or casual acquaintances,
one is vulnerable to physical harm, personal surveillance, or the loss
of property ... [Indeed,] any association in public, even with a passing
stranger requesting a match, can be the prelude to an assault.
From The Decline of Civility: A Comment on Erving Goffmans
Sociology, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology
13, 1 (1976).

The name
given to this theory derives from the emphasis Goffman places on acting
in his analysis of human behaviour. Dr Goffman has employed as
a framework the metaphor of the theatrical performance, says the
back-cover blurb on the paperback edition of his first book. Each
man in everyday social intercourse presents himself and his activities
to others, attempts to guide and control the impressions they form of
him, and employs certain techniques in order to sustai his performance.
From The Presentation of Self Everyday Life (N.Y.: Doubleday
Anchor, 1959).

It is
interesting that it is this aspect of Goffmans work that has been
most harshly criticized. His American colleagues, in particular, are
uncomfortable with the extent to which his emphasis on the perdurability
and over againstness of the social world delimits the scope
for individual agency. For a fuller discussion of this see Gaile McGregor,
A View from the Fort: Erving Goffman as Canadian, Canadian
Review of Sociology and Anthropology 23, 4.

This term
was initially popularized by Northrop Frye in his conclusion to a Literary
History of Canada, which was reprinted in The Bush Garden: Essays
on The Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971). I will have
more to say about Fryes analysis of this phenomenon later in the
paper. For my own take on the notion, see The Wacousta Syndrome:
Explorations in the Canadian Langscape [sic] (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1985). Although, like Bhabhas collection, this
book focuses primarily on formal culture, its broader project is to
unpack the historical development of -- and the psychological reasons
for -- the characterizing sense of being-in-the-world which, I would
claim, underlies all the particular social and cultural manifestations
I talk about in this paper. For a nutshell version of the story, see
the chart attached to this article as Appendix
1.

It is
important to realize that in Canada community is not just an idea or
a description or a civic category, but also an essential concomitant
of survival -- both physical and psychological. As such, it plays a
very different role in the Canadian imagination than in the American
one. Perhaps the extreme difficulty of forming a national identity
has been one of the factors that have made Canadian thinkers so deeply
aware of the fact that the community does not (as so many American thinkers
seem to believe) necessarily oppress individuals but rather, that individuals
come into being in and through the community, says Bruce Elder.
He continues: Canadian thinkers have stressed persistently the
importance of the community in the moral formation of the individuals
 indeed have stressed persistently that there can be no individual
being apart from social being. Perhaps, too, the immensity and diversity
of the country, and the very difficulty of creating a community in a
country of empty spaces help make Canadian thinkers so acutely aware
of the importance of community. From Image and Identity: Reflections
on Canadian Film and Culture (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University
Press with The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, 1989), 9.

I want
to underline that the descriptor feminine as I am using it here has
nothing to do with biological femaleness. Rather, it represents a psychological
orientation, a complex of attitudes, or a set of symbolic affinities.
The distinction will be clear if one reviews the range of personae who
turn up in Canadian fictions coded as Self. While it is true that the
corpus has more than the usual number of female protagonists, taken
in isolation this fact is misleading. The preference is for a certain
coding (for details see Appendix 1), not
a particular incarnation. Child-figures are almost equally frequent,
as are other socially vulnerable types from handicapped people to aboriginals.

Of all
Canadian cultural creators, it is perhaps David Cronenberg who makes
these connections most explicit. Nearly all of this filmmakers
most characterizing concerns and strategies can be seen as relating
to or deriving from the rather peculiar sense of being I have been circling
around in this paragraph. Numerous critics have talked, for instance,
about his Cartesian dualism, his obsession with the relationship
between mind and body. Significantly, they have also noted that, despite
his cautionary tales about the dangers of science, Cronenbergs
greatest ambivalence is reserved for the latter. [C]ongealing
goo seeping from ears and noses, squirming ... parasites inhabiting
peoples abdomens, strange growths, new organs, ... explosions
of blood and flesh ... These spectacular expressions of the bodys
will, says William Beard, constitute an insistence on the
physical, unknowable, untamable half of the human animal ... that ...
lies in wait beneath the bland ... cerebrations of the conscious mind
(From The Visceral Mind: The Major Films of David Cronenberg
in Piers Handling, ed., The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg
[Toronto: The Academy of Canadian Cinema, 1983], 43). [I]n Cronenbergs
universe, adds David Hogan, the flesh may be the strongest
 and the most dangerous  thing of all (Dark Romance:
Sexuality in the Horror Film [New York: McFarland, 1986], 279).
It is this aspect  the obsessive distaste for creature-liness
 that makes Cronenberg, despite his association with the pulpiest
of American pulp genres, an archetypal Canadian artist. If the ubiquitous
house symbol of Canadian literature carries a certain ambivalence simply
by virtue of its intimations of isolation and confinement, Cronenbergs
images of bodies turned literally deadly only make more explicit what
it is that always subtends the ritual reiteration of enclosure. The
real horror, he once told an interviewer, is looking
into a mirror and realizing that ones own treacherous flesh [is]
rotting on the bones, that death [is] already at work (in David
Chute, He Came from Within, Film Comment 16, 2 [1980]:
37).

At the
risk of getting ahead of the argument a little, it is worth noting that
the process described here is therapeutic on a social as well as a personal
level. Central ... to the phenomenon of national identity is an
impulse to mastery in the face of uncertainty, contradiction, heterogeneity
and difference, says Christine Ramsay. The nation holds
out the promise of stability in the face of what Regis Debray, in Marxism
and the National Question, calls the twin threats of disorder
and death which confront all societies and all individuals. But,
since the metaphysical paradox is that you can never simply make disorder,
death, heterogeneity, and the threatening margins go away, you work
to manage them and to sustain the illusion of absolute control from
the centre through the process of fantasy. It is in response to what
Timothy Brennan, in an article of the same name, calls the longing
for national form, or collective order and containment, that the
Western nation is invented and composed. Imagination and narrative become
central processes in the formation of national identities. From
Canadian Narrative Cinema from the Margins: The Nation
and Masculinity in Goin Down the Road, Canadian Journal
of Film Studies 2, 2-3 (1993), 28.

For insight
into Scotts unusual methods, I recommend a book written about
the experience by Montreal writer/painter Mary Meigs, one of the eight
women who portray themselves in the film. As the back cover blurb describes
it, Meigs spent two years writing this extraordinary narrative,
which begins as her story of being in the film and unfolds into a gentle,
intricate meditation on the experience of time, old age, magic and binding.
Time becomes still and circular as the womens self-images and
film images, their past and present, are bound inextricably with the
filmmakers vision. From In The Company of Strangers
(Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991).

Discussion
following Roland Barthes To Write: An Intransitive Verb?
in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and
the Sciences of Man. Eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 152.

With
respect to this somewhat difficult notion, it is perhaps useful to consider
Albert Cooks comments on the ambivalent function of the mask in
Greece. Classical drama, Cook explains, reverses the Lacanian analytic
model. Instead of the analyst-as-other using silences to direct the
quest(ion)er back upon him/herself, the dialogue of the dramatic
transaction ... takes place by suppressing the speech of the self, by
displacing it ... into two kinds of interacting [discourses, that is,
the words exchanged by actors and the lines spoken by the collective
chorus] ... Of this abnormal dialogue the mask is not only the symbol
but also the semantic vehicle. The audience, as it subjects itself to
the sequence of the structured statements in the play, reacts cathartically
both by identification, in so far as it is addressed, empathizing in
pity; and by disidentification, in so far as its own speech is suppressed,
by aroused fright. From Enactment: Greek Tragedy (Chicago:
Swallow Press, 1971), 36-7.

For another
perspective on this, it is worth noting that the landscape artist Philip
Fry takes my thesis about framing images in Canadian art and tries it
on a much broader range of works and styles. For the results, see Concerning
The Wacousta Syndrome (More About Whats Canadian in Canadian
Art) in Sightlines: Reading Contemporary Canadian Art.
Eds. Jessica Bradley and Lesley Johnstone (Montreal: Artextes Editions,
1994).

Shivers,
A.K.A. They Came from Within: The Parasite Murders
(1975); Rabid (1976); The Brood (1979); Scanners
(1980); Videodrome (1982); The Dead Zone (1983); The
Fly (1986); and Dead Ringers (1988). This list omits a number
of short films and films which did not see any significant commercial
distribution. For comments on Cronenbergs obsession with corporeal
integrity, see note 11.

In Take
One 4, 3 (Sept. 1973), rpt. in eds. Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson,
Canadian Film Reader (Toronto: Peter Martin & Take One Books,
1977), 234-51. For a range of perspectives on the problem
of masculinity in Canadian film, see the special issue of the Canadian
Journal of Film Studies 8, 1 (1999). For a discussion of the impact
of Fothergills thesis, and on the general links between colonialism
and compromised masculinity, see particularly Lee Parpart, Pit(iful)
Male Bodies: Colonial Masculinity, Class and Folk Innocence in Margarets
Museum, (63-86). Also of note is the lead article by Thomas
Waugh, Cinemas  Nations  Masculinities (8-44),
on implicit and explicit homoerotic elements in the oeuvre, which gave
its name to the issue.

Notably,
Seth Feldman identifies this film as a useful metaphor for the
Canadian ambiguity towards the American presence as a whole and the
manner in which this ambiguity expresses it in cinema. See Our
House, Their House: Canadian Cinemas Coming of Age in The
Beaver Bites Back: American Popular Culture in Canada. Eds. David
Flaherty and Frank Manning (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens
University Press, 1993), 209.

It is
interesting that Brian Johnson, in reviewing this film, takes the same
tack of underlining the un-Americanness of its approach  a similar
approach to that which we noted in reviews of Company. Johnson
states: Tom McManus delivers a quietly riveting performance as
Henry, a bank clerk who has aspirations to be an actor. He gets a night
job playing a cop on a cheesy TV crime series, then starts to wear his
uniform, and his weapon, on the street. His method-acting exercise gradually
gets out of hand. He takes his revolver to bed. Armed with the same
premise, Hollywood might have turned the movie into a vigilante shoot-em-up.
But Uniform sublimates violence into existential suspense. And beneath
it all is an unnerving current of homoeroticism. (From Sexual
Extremes, Macleans [September 13, 1993]: 44).

For a
compact, accessible discussion of the history of Canadian film, including
its documentary bias, see various articles in ed. Seth Feldman, Take
Two (Toronto: Irwin, 1984).

See,
for instance, Michel Euvrard and Pierre Verroneau, Direct Cinema
and Robert Daudelin, The Encounter between Fiction and the Direct
Cinema in Self-Portrait: Essays on the Canadian and Quebec
Cinemas. Eds. Pierre Veronneau and Piers Handling (Ottawa: Canadian
Film Institute, 1980).

An inner
fiction is any text depicted in a primary text  a story-within-a-story,
a play-within-a-play, a painting-within-a-painting, etc.  regardless
of how it gets there or the function it serves. The strategy is most
effective, however, when what is depicted is not merely the fiction
itself but the activity of its making. It is notable, in this respect,
that so many Canadian novels are what Sheldon Fischer (borrowing from
Alistair Fowler) call poioumenon: novels in which the main plot
is itself about the writing of a novel (Poioumenon and Performative
Storytelling in Canadian Fiction, Studies in Canadian Literature
22, 2 [1997]: 90). Fischer himself instances Margaret Laurences
The Diviners, Morley Callaghans A Fine and Private Place,
Robertson Davies Deptford Trilogy, M.G. Vassanjis
The Book of Secrets, Sinclair Rosss As For Me and My
House, Robert Kroetschs The Studhorse Man, George Bowerings
Burning Water, John Stefflers The Afterlife of George
Cartwright, Clarke Blaises I Had a Father, Jack Hodgins
Invention of the World, Timothy Findleys The Wars,
and several of Ondaatjes works, but a full list would
be much longer. Why the popularity of this particular form? Fischer,
citing Kroetsch on the role played by writing in the task of naming,
which is so crucial in a new country, suggests that it has something
to do with finding/creating identity. He states: These writers
thereby extend themselves out, as it were, into the world through their
characters, but at the same time they use those other characters as
a means of distilling or clarifying their own experience ... It may
be that we only know who we are when we write, and in that very process
establish our being (103).

I first
observed this phenomenon in comparing the contemporaneous late-eighties
lawyer shows L.A. Law and Street Legal. The usage is not
an artifact of any particular vehicle, but may be confirmed by looking
at courtroom scenes in more recent programs. The episode of Da Vincis
Inquest discussed on pages 18-19 is exemplary. That the solution
to the puzzle is a collective effort  rather than the property
or the achievement of a single American-style investigator -- is underlined
visually during the inquest scenes. Instead of jumping back and forth
between primary participants, the camera performs inclusiveness
by continually circling the room, establishing connections and relations,
and reminding us of the communal presence.

We find
a typical example of this rather wrong-headed view in Paul Rutherford,
Made in America: The Problem of Mass Culture in Flaherty
and Mannings The Beaver Bites Back. Without offering any
hard evidence whatsoever, Rutherford simply proclaims that the
forty-ninth parallel has only slight cultural significance these days
(276). Rutherford is unfortunately not alone in his thinking. What facilitates
this error is the fact that (as noted in the preamble to Appendix
2) Canadian television studies has devoted very little attention
to the texts themselves. A notable exception is Mary Jane Millers
Turn Up the Contrast: CBC Television Drama since 1952 (Vancouver:
CBC and UBC Press, 1987), which provides insightful and useful readings
of a number of early Canadian series. Substantive work of this sort
is rare, however. (This is one reason why there are so few references
in this section of my essay compared with the section on film.) Rather
than attempting any significant analysis of the materials on which they
are pronouncing, most scholars working in this field tend simply to
assume that what they would find if they did do the work is the cultural
homogenization predicted by globalization theory. For a critique of
this propensity, see my review of the Flaherty-Manning book in the Canadian
Journal of Sociology, available at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/cjscopy/articles/mcgregor.html

For a
sampling, see W.H. New, Borderlands: How We Talk About Canada
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998); Ian Angus, A Border Within: National
Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal & Kingston:
McGill-Queens University Press, 1997); and Russell Brown, Borderlines
and Borderlands in English Canada: The Written Line, Borderlands
Monograph Series no. 4 (Orono, Maine: Canadian-American Center, University
of Maine, 1990).

See,
for instance, Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History (Toronto:
Oxford University Press, 1976); also, for a different take
on the phenomenon, Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind:
Innis/McLuhan/Grant (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1984).

The best
known examples of this are collections of essays by two sisters who
came to Canada with their husbands in the 1830s: Catharine Parr Traill,
The Backwoods of Canada (1836), and Susanna Moodie, Roughing
It in the Bush (1852). Traills book is particularly notable
for the contrast between her conventionally Wordsworthian description
of the trip up the St. Lawrence and the horrific account she gives of
her first close-up encounter with the Canadian bush on arriving at their
homestead in the Peterborough district.

Frye,
A Literary History of Canada, 220-21.

Frye,
A Literary History of Canada, 225.

For a
more detailed explanation, see my discussion of The Frontier Antithesis
in The Wacousta Syndrome, 47-70.

Michael
Goldberg and John Mercer, The Myth of the North American City: Continentalism
Challenged (Vancouver: U.B.C. Press, 1986), 174.

In using
this term, McLuhan suggests that electronic media acts as a literal,
not merely a metaphorical extension to human senses. After three
thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical
technologies, the Western World is imploding, he says in his Introduction
to Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). He continues:
During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies into space.
Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended
our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both
space and time (3).

One of
my own favorite datum on this phenomenon is the fact that the dining
rooms in the two fanciest hotels in Yellowknife, rather than taking
advantage of the rude grandeur of the lakeside setting of the town,
are situated on the main floor with no view whatsoever. This feature
is not anomalous. There are very few places in the whole town, in fact,
where one can actually get a visual sense of being close to the wilderness.
And where there is a view, there are often countermeasures taken to
deny it. For a period back in the late eighties, I lived
in an older residential area out near one of Yellowknifes major
mines. Unlike most of the city, the street we were on ran right along
the lake. What struck me was that although every house had big picture
windows and many of them also had decks or balconies on the lake side,
none of them actually opened directly onto the lake. If one wanted to
go down to the shore, one had to go out the front door and around. Ive
never had the occasion to verify it for myself, but one of my students
once told me that this sort of arrangement was typical in Newfoundland
as well. Whatever the pragmatic reasons for choices like these, it always
struck me as faintly redolent of paranoia. Perhaps when one really is
out there, one doesnt want to be reminded of it 
or to make it too easy to slip over the line.

Urban
geographers have identified this penchant as a primary obstacle to achieving
rational planning in such areas as sewage disposal. Even by 1920,
the geographic growth of the Fairbanks settlement had taken on a highly
dispersed and fragmented form, notes one article. The main reason
for this, apart from special environmental conditions, was that many
individuals opted to locate outside the corporate limits of Fairbanks.
Before the city boundaries were expanded in 1970, there were 14,711
people living in the city and 7,833 in the immediate vicinity. Reasons
for remaining outside the city were (a) economic ones, namely avoiding
city taxes, and (b) the personal one of escaping crowded
city living (Roger Pearson and Daniel Smith, Fairbanks:
A Study of Environmental Quality, Musk-Ox 19 [1976]: 22).
To this I would add (from personal observation), first, that the 1970
expansion by no means ended the exodus, and second, as a result of the
increase in service and transportation costs (now that the environs
have been pushed further out) it is in most cases the personal rather
than the economic reasons that prompt the choice.

It is
intriguing how often these notions turn up as touchstone referents in
discussions of the Canadian experience; not exactly for good versus
bad, but for safe versus risky, or us versus not-us. In our efforts
to imagine, narrate, and master a centre for ourselves,
says Christine Ramsay, Canadians have grappled with the issue
of regionalism as a centrifugal force that pulls us apart from within;
but at the same time we have also grappled with the issue of American
economic domination and cultural imperialism as a centrifugal force
from without that likewise threatens to dissolve us as a centered, independent,
and autonomous imagined community (Canadian Narrative Cinema,
32).

Margaret
Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1970), np. I chose this particular example because of the connection
with settlers tales (see note 30). However, it is an image that
obviously resonates for the poet. It is notable, for instance, that
the first poem in her first major collection, The Circle Game
(1966; rpt.Toronto: Anansi, 1978), is entitled This is a photograph
of me. It is also notable, given what I have been saying about
the Canadian sense of beleaguerment, that the subject of this photograph
has apparently drowned. I am in the lake, in the center/of the
picture, just under the surface (17).